India

The formal opening of the BRICS Bank in Shanghai on Jul. 21 following the seventh summit of the world’s five leading emerging economies held recently in the Russian city of Ufa, demonstrates the speed with which an alternative global financial architecture is emerging.

Long-term agricultural growth in India is slowing down. The lands that saw remarkable increases in productivity in the 1970s and 80s, thanks to the technology rolled out as part of the first “Green Revolution”, are not yielding the same results today.

Despite being Asia’s third-largest economy, positioning itself as a major geopolitical player under a new nationalist government, India's first ever Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) paints a grim picture of poverty and deprivation despite billions of dollars being funneled into state-sponsored welfare schemes.

Chottey Lal, 43, a daily wage labourer at a construction site in NOIDA, a township in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is a beleaguered man. After a gruelling 12-hour daily shift at the dusty location, he and his wife Subha make barely enough to feed a family of seven.

As the leaders of the BRICS five meet in the Russian city of Ufa for their annual summit Jul. 8–10, their agenda is likely to be dominated by economic and security concerns, triggered by the continuing economic crisis in the European Union and the security situation in the Middle East.

For an entire month beginning in February 2015, a group of between 40 and 50 residents of the Durgapur Village in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand would gather at the site of a hydroelectric power project being carried out by the state-owned Tehri Hydro Development Corporation (THDC).

Eighty-year-old Chenabai Kushwaha sits on a charpoy under a neem tree in the village of Chitawar, located in the Tikamgarh district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, staring intently at a dictaphone.

According to new data released by the World Bank Tuesday, investments in infrastructure in 139 emerging economies shot up to 107.5 billion dollars in 2014, with just five countries – Brazil, Colombia, India, Peru and Turkey – accounting for 73 percent of the total.

As the United Nations closes its chapter on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and charts a new plan of action under the framework of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), India – a country of 1.2 billion people – is confronting its resource challenges.

In a bid to overhaul the country's child labour laws, the Indian government has banned the employment of children below 14 years of age in various commercial ventures, while permitting them to work in family enterprises and on farmlands after school hours and during vacations.

Although forced prostitution and trafficking of women remains a huge challenge in India, health experts, policy-makers and legal advocates say that most of the country’s estimated four million commercial sex workers join the trade of their own free will.

Mamta Bai, 36, distinctly remembers the first time the police came to her village: it was December 2014 and her neighbour, Purva Bai, had just been beaten unconscious by her alcoholic husband, prompting Mamta to make a distress call to the nearest station.

When the United Nations hosted a panel discussion last year urging its partners to “break their silence” on open defecation, Singapore’s deputy permanent representative Mark Neo was outspoken in his characterisation: “Open defecation is a euphemism. What we are talking about is shitting in the open.”